Adobe PM & Evangelists Coming to Europe

In less then a week I will be in Europe with my team to talk with customers, engage with developers, speak at events, learn a ton and have some fun.

Specifically, members of the Flash Product Management & Evangelism teams (Mike, Lee and Thibault) will be hosting several Flash User Group meetings to discuss Adobe’s roadmap for Flash Player and AIR. These will be great, interactive meetings where you can get detailed information about the new features and innovations happening in Flash.

Simultaneously (in some case, back-to-back events while in others, joint events) members of the Developer Product Management & Evangelism teams (Adam, Michael and myself) will be hosting several Flex User Group meetings. In the Flex User Group meetings we’ll discuss the recent changes to Flex, provide an update on the roadmap for the runtimes and tooling as it relates to Flex, discuss the incubation of Flex within the Apache Software Foundation and educate developers on how to get involved. In several meetings, we will be joined by active members of the Apache Flex project who will discuss their own personal involvement, give an update on progress and in some cases highlight their own potential engineering contributions to the project.

All of us will then suit up and head over to FITC Amsterdam to talk further about Flash, Flex and HTML. I am quite excited for my session where I will cover what Adobe is doing for HTML/CSS/JS developers. My session will be focused heavily on the work we are doing to better the foundation of the web – through work with standards, contributions to WebKit and partnering with browser/tooling vendors to lessen the fragmentation and inconsistencies rampant in the web. I’ll provide a detailed update on CSS Shaders, Regions and Exclusions but more excitingly – will highlight new contributions we are working on or partnering with others on. Want to know more about Shadow DOM? I’ll cover it. Want to learn more about how presentational attributes can (and should) be normalized between CSS and SVG for cleaner more performant code? I’ll cover it. Want to know more about how Adobe is helping the way you load and manage media in an HTML application? I’ll cover it. Etc etc etc. It’s going to rock!

Here is the detailed schedule, including links to registration sites for the User Group events:

And lastly, I am spending dedicated time with individual developers, enterprises and agencies to learn more about what they are doing with HTML. What content are you building with HTML? What is difficult about it? What tools are you using? What are the roughest parts of the underlying web (audio? performance? precision? graphics? etc) and how can we make meaningful contributions to soften those pain points? I am in total sponge mode – trying to learn as much about how developers work (or attempt to work) when building HTML-based content and trying to identify the places where Adobe can help. To enable that, I highly encourage anyone to find me at any of these events and talk about what you’re working on, regardless if its Flash-based or HTML-based.

I am beyond excited to hit the road and talk to developers. There was definitely a bumpy road for Flash and Flex at the end of last year but these user group tours along with soon-to-be-published whitepapers about Flash/AIR and Flex will help quash rumors and clear up confusion. I am also very excited with what we are doing to enable modern web developers and designers working with HTML, CSS, SVG & JS. Though this may be hard for some to hear, I am excited that Adobe is recognizing there are choices when developing interactive content. Instead of ignoring those choices, we are working to make sure that regardless whether you chose Flash or HTML as your client technology, Adobe provides stellar tools and services that cater to both those worlds while also solving hard problems.